


the march girls

by firstaudrina



Category: Little Women (1994), Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: F/M, au vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:09:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laurie marries Amy, but sometimes he wonders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the march girls

**Author's Note:**

> Yesterday I watched _Little Women_ , as I do every Christmas, and was overcome with feels, as I am every Christmas. But then I very unexpectedly got the fic bug and spent the rest of the night writing this, lol. Laurie's March thirst is apparently very inspiring! Movie canon because I have not read the book, oop.

_Just as you have always known you would never marry a pauper, I have always known I should be part of the March family._

 

Laurie marries Amy.

Their home is filled with his tinkling little songs and her beautifully painted teacups. Their days are spent chasing after Meg's mischievous twins, or visiting Jo's school for afternoon adventures. They have a daughter, Bess, who is neither quiet nor demure but familiarly skilled at the piano. Amy frets about the state of the curtains and Laurie buys her a lime on every birthday. Sometimes he can't help laughing at her, just a little bit, taken with the wrinkle of her buttonish nose and her eternal exasperation over frivolities. She is a silly, unserious woman, his Amy, but Laurie loves her. He is a silly, unserious man. 

Laurie marries Amy, but sometimes he wonders.

 

 

Laurie marries Beth.

The summer after Meg's marriage and Laurie's rejected proposal, Jo runs away to New York City. Amy sets sail for Europe. Orchard House stands nearly empty and awfully quiet, just the bustling of Mr. and Mrs. March and Beth's trembling piano. Laurie is on the precipice of manhood but he cannot make himself cross the line, so instead of going to London to learn the art of business, he sulks around his grandfather's house and squanders youth and money.

He sees Beth taking afternoon sun in the garden and crosses the brambling bushes to sit with her. Even after so many years, she is shy and blushing. She is always pale nowadays, her eyes sleepless and sore. But when Laurie confesses how very much he misses her sisters, Beth alights like a steady candle flame.

"I would never begrudge them their adventures," Beth says softly. "It's only that I can't understand wanting to go on one."

"I understand your meaning perfectly," Laurie tells her. "If Orchard House were my home, I'd never leave it either."

He begins to pass his days with Beth, playing one side of the piano while she plays the other until she laughs breathless and needs to sit still for several long minutes. He helps tack up Amy's sketches along the walls of Beth's room and listens while she reads Jo's letters aloud, quiet and quavering. _I'm so pleased to hear you are keeping one another company_ , Jo writes. _I cannot think of sweeter company in this world than my best sister and best friend._

Late one morning Laurie is sitting at Beth's side while they name the kittens in the newest litter. "Do you think you'll ever marry, Beth?"

He isn't sure what possesses him to put a question like that to her, and she pinks immediately, eyes downcast.

Laurie is quick to add, "Forgive me if I offend you, and please don't feel compelled to answer."

"No, it's only…" Beth runs her fingers over downy kitten heads, little papery ears. "The only men I've ever felt comfortable beside are father and Mr. Laurence and, well, _you_. But you're not really like a man."

She realizes her words a moment late and goes blotchily bright red while Laurie laughs himself hoarse. He shushes her as she attempts an apology. "No, my dear Beth, you are quite right – I'm truly not." He smiles while he studies her flushed face, not as classically lovely as Meg or spirited as Jo or porcelain as Amy, but still, in her own way, beautiful. "You know you need only ask, and I would be yours in a trice."

"Oh, don't make fun of me, Laurie," Beth implores, desperate, and Laurie softens ever farther.

"Never, Beth," he says. "I promise."

Beth would never ask, but as summer turns to autumn, Laurie continues to offer. Each inquiry becomes ever more thoughtful, until it seems to Laurie that nothing would make him prouder than to be husband to Beth March for whatever length of time he is able. Mrs. March takes him aside to speak in low, serious tones about the reality of Beth's tender heart, the time she may or may not have left. But Laurie is serious too.

They marry in the garden of Orchard House, where Laurie remains once the day is done. Beth is bright and strong for a time. She teaches Laurie how to sew, which he finds frightfully difficult.

Christmas comes but when it goes, so does Beth.

 

 

Laurie marries Meg.

It all starts with Sally Moffat's coming out. Jealousy makes him cruel and embarrassment makes him contrite, but he learns the luck of quarrelling with Meg: she is noble, kind, and forgiving. She is perhaps the closest embodiment of her parents' beliefs, espousing a kind of internal system of checks and balances towards perfection, so to see unfamiliar vanity in her had been startling. That is the only excuse Laurie has for his behavior, though it is far from a good one, but Meg is not one to hold it against him long.

Once apologies are exchanged and laughter shared, Laurie signs his name in every spot on her dance card. By the end of the night they both have blisters on their heels and color in their cheeks. Meg presses her hands to her nipped-in waist, proclaiming, "Now I know why Marmee so abhors a corset!" And then she seems embarrassed to have said so in front of him.

"Any stance of Marmee's is one I am duty-bound to uphold," Laurie says, teasing her. "Though even I couldn't deny that it does have a certain aesthetic appeal."

Meg's mouth opens and shuts and then she smacks his arm playfully, very unlike herself. "Theodore Laurence, I expected better of you."

"Well, Margaret March, I am sorry to disappoint." 

Exertion and excitement have made them both silly, and the carriage ride back to their respective homes is musical with giggling. Laurie jumps out first into the crisp snow before stepping up to help Meg down (now in her modest blue dress with her hair divested of borrowed jewels), gloved hand in gloved hand. Very suddenly, and very impulsively, he puts his warm lips to her cool cheek. He thinks she will chide him again but she only smiles prettily, eyelashes fluttering with nervous surprise.

They keep eyes on each other all the way up to their doors, and when Meg stops at hers she lifts a hand in a wave. Laurie returns it, his heart still performing a quadrille in his chest.

Not long after that, he ventures a tentative inquiry to a different March sister. "Jo," he wonders, eyes on her fair jaw smudged with ink. "What do you think of me?"

"Why, you're the best of the best, my truest and dearest friend," Jo says. "Surely you know it, Teddy, don't make me puff up your ego any more!" She looks at him with those vivid eyes that see so much of him but so little at the same time. "I sometimes wish you had come when we were all much smaller and you could have grown up as our brother all that time. For that's what you are – a brother, which is better than a friend."

Laurie isn't sure that it was the answer he had been hoping to hear, but as it settles in him, he thinks it might be the one he needed. "That's my wish, too," he says. 

Later still, he says to Meg, "D'you know I heard from Sally Moffat that you're in love with me?"

Meg gapes at him but Laurie can't keep a straight face for even a minute, and his laughter sets off hers. "Laurie, why would you ever say such a thing? Honestly, the gossip at that party was bad enough."

"Well it's sort of true," he admits, still grinning. "After I got my invitation, I was told it was due to _your_ incredible fondness for me. I think they thought to throw us together."

She laughs again. "I suppose it did work then, didn't it? Just not in the way they hoped."

"Oh, I don't know," Laurie says airily, looking at her. "Didn't it?"

Meg's cool blue eyes regard him quizzically, but he has no doubt she understands his meaning.

He spends four years at Harvard sending love notes back to Meg March, and in the last one he is bold enough to enclose a ring. Jo is unhappy with the match at first (he will always remember the anger in her voice as she exclaims _so I'm to lose you both at once?_ ) but the promise of her sister residing just one door over seems to soothe her. 

Laurie's old tutor attends the wedding, and he spends the entire evening looking terribly put out.

 

 

Laurie marries Jo.

Eventually.

She turns him down first when they are both so very young, Laurie flush with ardor and stupidity. "I'll wait," he tells her, stubborn, with tears in his eyes. "I'll wait and wait."

Jo gives him a sad, sorry look, as though he is a poor, pathetic creature, utterly pitiful. Perhaps he is. He only knows that being with Jo is the only time he feels at home within himself, as though all of his peculiarities are not only tolerable, but desirable. He can't think of a better way to spend a life than at the side of the only person who has offered you true understanding. Without that, he's not sure he wants to share his life at all.

In the long months of her New York independence and his European recklessness, they don't exchange a single letter. He thinks of secrets passed between them over the years, their shared unselfconsciousness; he remembers a day they tramped through the woods, how they ended up covered in mud but happy as anything that lived and breathed amongst the green.

"Teddy, have I ever told you," Jo had said then, using a big knobbly branch as a walking stick, "that I sometimes wonder if, through some trickery of fate, our souls were switched? We each ended up in the wrong skin."

Her expression was thoughtful, and Laurie was drawn as ever to the fine molding of her features, her boyish jaw and the depth of her dark eyes. "Yes," he said simply. "You know I've always thought so, my dear fellow."

Jo turned to him with a smiling gaze. "If I were a boy, I would be you and if you were a girl, you would be me."

"Honestly, I think I would enjoy it," Laurie said. "I would be content to play my music and see to the household tasks and have none of Grandfather's dreaded business."

Jo rolled her eyes. "You only say so because you've never had to do any of it."

Laurie laughed. "Perhaps. But no, truly – truly I don't think I would mind it. Not one bit." He gave her a flinty, sideways grin. "You could be my husband, and support us with your wicked novels."

Jo's look was amused, but he fancied the idea appealed to her. Afterwards they scooped up flowers together and put them in Laurie's hair, a fairy garland.

The first letter he receives from Jo in months tells him of Beth's passing. It reaches him in a London office where he usually sits dully behind a desk all day and composes music in his head. The pages fall from his hands before his consciousness has caught up with him, and like waves the news washes over him again and again: Beth is dead, Beth is dead. 

He abandons his post at once, uncaring, thinking only of the loneliness of Orchard House, the absence of Beth like a stopped clock: where there was once a gentle, rhythmic _tic_ , there is now only silence. He learns later that Amy is still abroad and feels immense guilt at not taking her home with him.

When he arrives, Jo throws her arms around him and puts her face against his neck, their earlier awkwardness forgotten in the face of their shared pain. Exhaustion marks her face in two sooty thumbprints beneath either eye, red-rimmed from tears he will never be privy to. "I came as soon as I could," he says, unable to keep himself from cupping her cheeks, feeling her real and live under his hands.

"And I'm so glad, Laurie, so glad you did." Her eyes close, dark straight lashes against her cheeks, and her cheek sags against his palm. There is nothing that could press him from her side, and so they pass the months like they did in their youth – carrying on around the countryside, except with two new partners in crime, Meg's Daisy and Demi. The ghost of Beth is heavy on their hearts, but it feels good to be close to her here, close to the places she loved best.

When Laurie asks Jo to marry him the second time, he is only a little older, but certainly smarter and more somber. In return, Jo is quieter, more resigned, but still she shakes her head. 

"Tell me you need twenty years' worth of being solitary Jo March and I will be there on your forty-fifth birthday to see if you have changed your mind," Laurie says.

"Teddy." Jo's voice is fond and exasperated. "You cannot make such ridiculous oaths. You must live your life as you see fit, and so must I."

"That's what I am doing," he says. "It is. You say we would only drive each other mad, but I'd rather be mad with you than anyone. I was wrong when first I asked, Jo, I know that now. I don't want to make you a rich man's wife. I only ask that you make me a poor woman's husband."

Jo seems to look at him with new eyes, glowing and contemplative, but still she says no.

The third time, Jo asks him.

The passing of Aunt March has brought Jo Plumfield, the house of so many hours' adolescent grumbling. The first honor of the manor goes to hosting the wedding of Amy to old friend Fred Vaughn, whom Jo and Laurie both regard with suspicion despite themselves. Plumfield falls empty again, but Jo has plans for it, and as they stroll the drafty halls, she remarks to Laurie, "It is strange that this house belongs to me."

"A very big responsibility for little Jo," he jokes. "But don't worry; I believe you are up to the task of it."

He has always liked how Jo walks, with her back straight and her hands clasped behind her at the wrist. "You know I'm not exactly a poor woman now. I have Plumfield to my name, and a publishable manuscript besides."

Laurie looks at her curiously. "Too true, my dear fellow."

"I have no need of anything at present," she continues. "And I have found that without the pressing of need, I can turn my thoughts more fully to the question of want."

Laurie's grin was slow and curling. "And what does Miss Jo March want?"

Jo's fingers released her wrist so she could put a hand in his. "A master of music for her new school. Preferably one who remains on premises, of course – for the ease of it."

"Of course," Laurie laughs, giving her a gentle tug so she comes close to him and then waiting, smile on his face, for Jo's kiss.


End file.
